Gemma 4 is the first really small model that feels smart, to me. I mean, Qwen 3.6 is arguably better at some coding tasks. But, Gemma 4 has shockingly good reasoning for a small model. Even the tiny 12B, at 7GB on disk in the 4-bit QAT quant, feels like a really big model of a couple years ago. It's a good tool user, can search the web (when given the appropriate skill or MCP), has good vision capabilities, and pretty good prose.

I've only used the Hy3 preview, so I don't want to judge too harshly, yet. But, I wasn't very impressed with it a couple of months ago.